Operational Tool for Characterizing High-Frequency Sea Level Oscillations

The progressive upgrade of tide gauges to match tsunami warning requirements, tied with an upgrade of tide gauges with 1-min or less sampling and latency, has led to a huge amount of data available worldwide for studies of coastal hazards related to high-frequency sea level oscillations. This upgrade in the observation network poses a challenge in matching the operational data flow, quality control and processing, as well as an opportunity for a more immediate evaluation and understanding of the physical phenomena contained in the raw data, such as meteotsunamis and infragravity waves. The main purpose of this study is to present a new operational tool that enables, for the first time, user-friendly and fast exploitation of an up to now hidden information on high-frequency sea level oscillations. Developed and implemented for 40 tide gauges at the main ports of the Spanish coast, the new tool is based on the automatic analysis of 2-Hz raw data and the online publication of relevant products in near real time. It includes an event detection algorithm and a display calendar to select and review historical events, resulting in a revolutionary advanced toolbox, a new window to phenomena that affects ports operations and infrastructures. This toolbox, combined with the open dataset, provides the first steps for considering HFSLO in the definition of operational risk management. Dealing with these raw data in near real time requires careful selection of appropriate algorithms and quality control procedures, with therefore additional difficulties, that are discussed in this paper.